I am becoming

Pretty much.

I haven't played a lot of other MMORPGs, but there's so much to do in WoW. The world is incredibly intricate, detailed, and just fun. And gorgeous. And you can do things besides fight mindlessly.

Plus, now, all my friends are on.

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ALL of them, Swensen? ALL??? *mock growl*

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Just the ones that matter...

Hoon de hoon de hoon, you opened yourself up for that one, admit it.

I'd be glad to lend you the discs if'n you want to try a trial.

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*dies of "friend doesn't love me good enough" pain*

I think I'll take you up on that... sometime in 2006. If I allow such a thing into my presence at this time, All Will Be Lost.

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I know the feeling.

Well, anytime.

And you know I was just funnin'

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Yes, I know. *hug*

Hey. Lunch sometime [after next payday]?

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redminx.livejournal.com

I really enjoy it - if you're interested in playing and can get your hands on the disks, I have a 10 day free trial code.

I joined because they have it for Mac as well as PC, and friends at Apple were all doing the beta before it was ever released. The graphics are gorgeous, the interface is much more intuitive than others I've seen (like Shadowbane) and there are many things you can do on your own if your friends don't happen to be on, but a lot of quest that are enjoyable for groups.

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odanu.livejournal.com

I keep finding new fun things to do, I keep meeting fun people to game with,and I like looking at my characters and the scenery because they look cool. There isn't a lot of downtime or built in frustration, other than the lag in Iron Forge, and if I get bored with one activity, there are a thousand others to try. I recently got hooked on the player vs player "capture the flag" games in Warsong Gulch. Much funness. And I like all the tactical stuff. You could spend years learning how to min-max your characters or how to best balance them for various roles.

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cpthorfe.livejournal.com

The production values are very high; it's a rich and detailed world with lots of history. It's easy to pick up and learn.. and it's very casual player friendly.

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heartshapedcunt.livejournal.com

It's SO addictive. Amazing game. My favorite MMORPG.

It's hard to describe unless you play it really. The Night Elf villages are so gorgeous. It's a pretty game with lots of fun things to do.

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siliconshaman.livejournal.com

I don't know.. I don't play it myself. But I do know that several people of my acquaintence are highly addicted to it... as in they don't stop to eat, sleep, have sex or bathe, level of addiction. Consider yourself warned, down this road lies madness...

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jakeexperience.livejournal.com

World of Warcrack ... World of What the Hell Happened to My Life?
<-- I've heard those titles, too.

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Every MMO gets called crack. Evercrack was the first. City of Crack was another.

I enjoy playing MMOs a lot, but will walk away from it in a second for sex or if I stink.

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It's pretty much a given that I'll go through a lengthy "how the hell is it DAWN, I just put the kids to bed five minutes ago" obsession with any new game I buy.

Hell, I do it when programming (for fun rather than for pay) some new exciting project.

The only difference is in how long that obsessive stretch lasts. With Ultima Online the initial "Oh hell, I was planning to sleep last night but now I have to go to class" stretch lasted four or five months, and the "getting mostly enough sleep, doing the essential tasks required to sustainably support my UO addiction" lasted for 2.5 years or so.

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I've played WoW, DAoC, and EQ so here is my break down.

Graphics: Winner DAoC. WoW is too cartoony feeling for me. It adds a lot of 'visual' interest in the game through spell effects, but overall, the landscapes, while grand, don't do much for me. EQ was bland. DAoC had a definite feel of realism to it. I dislike how WoW characters look while I love how DAoC characters look.

Death: Winner WoW. Your character is going to die, it is part of the game. Punishing the death by stripping you of equipment or penalizing your experience sucks. In WoW, you do get an xp penalty, but it is the built in penalty of not being able to gain xp until you retrieve your corpse. Unlike EQ where you have to retrieve your corpse as a corporeal being who can then get attacked and killed, you do it as a ghost, moving swiftly.

Levelling: Winner WoW. We play the game to Level, that little rush that makes you feel like you are actually accomplishing something. There aren't any low levels (at least to level 17) where you are wandering around wondering where you should be 'hunting'.

Crafting: Winner WoW. EQ suffered by being the first. DAoC was good, but very complex. WoW is just as complex but does all the figuring for you and doesn't require you to do a lot of steps in crafting like DAoC (at least at low levels). DAoC required you to craft each and ever component for a weapon and when you fail, you lose the stuff. When you succeed, you really don't have anything better than you could have purchased from a vendor (until higher levels). WoW crafting is a money making proposition. Gather resources for free, craft items, sell them for profit. Sometimes significant profit.

Overall World: Winner DAoC. This is a subjective thing, but I really loved DAoCs worldview/paradigm. I never got to experience the realm battles, but it was the best PvP element I've seen. I don't eschew PvP violence, but I hate having my enjoyment of the game disrupted by others. In WoW a level 60 person can camp out in a newbie area for a long time killing newbies over and over until the Local Defense can rally high enough level characters to challenge the intruder. DAoC recognized the fact that PvP can be fun and gave it a place and put everyone not interested behind the gates to the battlefields. DAoC also gave global consequences for PvP activity, so it mattered if your realm had captured an artifact or not. It mattered if a guild was in place to craft doors for the fortresses. It actually felt like player actions affected the game. WoW doesn't have that feeling. It is large enough that you just don't feel it, but really, how long has the Defias (a gang of humans) been crafting the doomsday device in the Deadmines? How many heroes have tried to stop them and once the heroes reach level 30, do they even care the Defias are STILL around? It is a flaw in most of these games that the social order is codified and changes very very slowly. WoW at least provides such a large number of quests that starting with a different character types you can end up doing an entirely different set of quests with only a few repeating at low levels.

WoW wins in the end. It has gained a lot by seeing what everyone else was doing and failing at and filling the niche.

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I also want to mention that WoW gives you a small bonus for not playing constantly. If you have been away for awhile, your character is 'well rested' so your character gains xp at twice the rate which means quicker levelling.

One of the things that annoys me about WoW is game time passes at the same rate as real time, which means if you play mainly at night, you only get to see the game world... at night.

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Thank you for the game-by-game comparisons!

The crafting bit for WoW sounds pretty similar to UO's. Beginning craftsmen usually gathered their own resources (killing deer for hides, mining for ore then smelting) while the higher-ups, who could sell their wares for decent gp, bought their resources from others. My crafter character (tailor, miner, blacksmith, carpenter, lumberjack with just enough fighting skills to make her axe useful when attacked) had just hit the point in her blacksmith skill where she could make armor people would actually buy when UO changed drastically and I lost interest in relearning the game.

One of my major annoyances with UO was the periodic "Okay, now you're playing an entirely different game and get to relearn everything, also most of the skill you've worked to accumulate is now useless, have fun" patches. Does WoW do that?

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No, WoW's patches tend to be pretty low-impact, in general. Whatever UI changes they make are usually improvements and generally very intuitive.

Sometimes, a patch will require certain classes to redo their entire skill tree, but since that's something you normall have to PAY to do in-game, that's not much of a complaint.

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UO suffers from being The First and so a lot of the changes it had to go through, WoW, being The Recent, initiated right from the start. I haven't been around long enough to go through any big patches.

I will say that the initial downloading of material after the game is installed is more than daunting.

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Yeah, but is not that true of any MMOG?

City of Heroes took a gigabyte download or some shit before I could play it.

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I don't recall CoH being an ordeal to get updated. WoW seemed like an ordeal.

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This brings me to a new question: I've got dial-up. I found that increasingly frustrating on UO, because I simply couldn't keep up with the other players. I'm assuming that I should not even try any MMOGs until such a time as I can swing broadband. Yes/No?

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